


Quiet Little Monsters

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Series: The Patience of Angels [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angel/Demon Sex, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Aziraphale's True Form (Good Omens), Crowley's True Form (Good Omens), Demisexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Demisexual Crowley (Good Omens), Feelings Realization, First Time, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Multi, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Protective Crowley, Sharing a Body, Soft Top Aziraphale (Good Omens), Worried Aziraphale (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2020-10-21 19:11:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20698466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: Their greatest fear has always been that they would be found out. That they would end up alone. They never expected to end up alone together.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *sigh* I really tried not to make this fic have chapters. OH WELL. 
> 
> If you're over on Tumblr, please consider following me at [gaslightgallows.tumblr.com](https://gaslightgallows.tumblr.com/) for more fic, reblogs about writing, and lots of randomness. 
> 
> Thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

Crowley had lost Aziraphale. Then he’d found him again. And then Satan showed up, and Crowley prepared to kiss life, the universe, and everything else goodbye, because what could he lose now? 

And then he looked up from where he was cringing on his knees on the tarmac and saw Aziraphale standing over him, flaming sword in hand.

“Come up with something!” Aziraphale demanded. “Or I’ll—”

Stunned, Crowley looked dumbly from the sword to the angel, and for a fleeting moment, he thought Aziraphale might actually use the thing and put him out of his misery before his boss got the chance, and he wasn’t sure whether he felt betrayed or grateful. 

Aziraphale’s blue eyes flared at him, and then without warning, he lowered the sword. “Or I’ll never talk to you again.”

The fear that had rippled through Crowley when he felt the firmament shake at the approach of the devil was nothing compared to the white-hot agony that seared through him with those words. Because he’d already lived through that reality once today.

_“Aziraphale! Where the heaven are you, you idiot?! I can’t find you!”_

And he didn’t think he could survive even five more minutes of life without Aziraphale in it.

* * *

The sword was gone. Crowley had said nothing, hadn’t even smirked when the delivery man asked where it was, although Aziraphale had not been casual about sitting on it, in the plainly vain hope that he might be allowed to keep it. 

But what was given away freely would clearly not be taken back by stealth, and so the sword was gone again. 

And for the second time in his life, Aziraphale found himself bereft of a sword but with a demon pressed close to his side, for protection. 

He sat on the bus and held Crowley’s hand in his, resting their joined fingers on his leg, and he scarcely breathed. He had spent many years making a habit of unconscious respiration, since people tended to notice if he wasn’t breathing, but now he nearly didn’t dare. He thought about shifting their hands onto Crowley’s thigh instead. He did not do that, but he wanted to and thought about it, and even gingerly imagined what the fabric of Crowley’s jeans would feel like against the underside of his wrist. He was terrified, and working hard not to blush, but he was undeniably thinking about it. 

He wanted this. Going home with Crowley. It was a strange symbolic barrier they had never once managed to breach, not in all their time on Earth. By unwritten rule, Crowley visiting the bookshop was permitted, because the bookshop was by design a semi-public space; people came and went all the time. Likewise with the park and the Ritz. But Crowley’s flat was private, and they never met in private. They had never allowed themselves to _be_ private together

He considered the facts of his position: that he was homeless, effectively cast out by his own kind (if not cast out in truth. He didn’t think he had done anything quite so unforgivable, but then, Crowley had Fallen for asking too many questions), and still in danger, though whether from Heaven or from Hell, he wasn’t quite sure. But to his astonishment, the one thing he was definitely not, was afraid. 

He had helped to save the world, to save humanity, and he had watched a child born for the sole purpose of bringing destruction turn his back on his divine purpose. 

All for the sake of love.

_Our own side, indeed,_ he thought, with a little smile, in spite of the lump in his throat.

“What do you think?” Crowley roused himself from a slump and cocked his head to one side, more crow than snake. “About Agnes’ last prophecy?” 

Aziraphale had to shake his head. “I’m not entirely sure what I think.”

“Well, you’ve studied that book more than anyone else in four hundred years, apart from that witch girl in Tadfield. And you were able to work out everything about Adam. You must’ve gotten at least a general sense of how Agnes worded things. When she talks about ‘choosing faces’ and ‘playing with fire’, do you think she’s being literal? Or is it all some sort of elaborate metaphor?”

“Not a metaphor in sight. All of Agnes’ prophecies were shockingly literal and blunt. After all, this is a woman who put down ‘Do not buy Betamax’ in plain and unambiguous English. It’s just a question of interpreting how she intended her language to be read.” Aziraphale sighed. “I’ve got some theories about what it might mean, but either one will involve putting a great deal of faith in me.” 

“I’m okay with that.”

“Yes. You’ve always been much better at that than I have.”

Crowley shrugged and looked out the window. “One of us has to be.”

Warmth bloomed and curled through Aziraphale like vines, but he couldn’t relax. It went without saying that any solution he devised was going to be a terrible risk. To both of them, obviously, but to Crowley most of all. And he was on the verge of saying so, when he felt slim, cool fingers squeezing his hand lightly. “You’re trembling,” said Aziraphale, softly worried.

“I’m tired,” Crowley admitted, beginning to droop with more than stress and half a bottle of wine. “You try stopping time for an entire planet and two otherworldly planes. Even for a minute and twenty seconds.” 

“Are you going to be all right? I’ve seen you collapse from far less drastic efforts. Like that time you had to hold back an invading Prussian army?”

“Nngk. Dunno. When did I do that?”

“I… don’t precisely remember. But you did it, and then promptly passed out on the battlefield. Nearly scared me into a whole new corporation, too, I might add.”

“I don’t feel all _that_ bad... just tired.”

Aziraphale looked at the exhausted face of the being who, rightly or not, had been the center of his universe almost since Creation, and made a choice. He gently returned the hand clasp and then put his arm around Crowley.

“Hmgh?”

“Hush,” said Aziraphale, coaxing the demon’s head onto his shoulder. “It’s a ways yet to London. Try to sleep.” 

Crowley mumbled something unintelligible but, lulled by the steady rhythm of the bus and the angel’s safe, familiar presence, he soon dropped off. Aziraphale closed his eyes, and like the inveterate sybarite he was, inhaled the scent of Crowley’s hair like the bouquet of a fine wine. 

After a moment or two, his eyes snapped open, and he shifted a little uncomfortably in his seat. He had forgotten: one did not necessarily have to make an Effort for one to feel as hungry as if it was the last day of Lent and as stirred as an ill-made martini.

* * *

Crowley roused reluctantly from his nap to find that the bus driver was waiting, confused and impatient, for them to disembark. “Er,” he said, looking up at Aziraphale with bleary eyes and seeing only a halo of pale curls. 

“I hope you had a nice nap. We’re outside your building, I believe.”

Still grumbling, Crowley slouched down the aisle and off the bus and all the way up to the top floor of the building, still holding Aziraphale’s hand. 

But when they got to his flat and Crowley unlocked the door and went in, the connection was broken. “Come on in, angel, there’s nothing in here to…” He trailed off as he turned and saw Aziraphale staring in wide-eyed distaste at what remained of one of the Dukes of Hell. “Oh that. Yeah, just step over it.”

“I can’t.”

“Oh, don’t get squeamish on me now…”

“I’m telling you, Crowley, I physically – or metaphysically – cannot enter your home across this… barrier.”

“Oh, for…” Growling, Crowley pondered what to do. He would have preferred to blithely snap his fingers and then not watch Ligur’s very icky remains dissipate into nothingness, but he simply did not have the energy. He sighed. “Just take the bridal joke as read, okay?”

“…Sorry?” Crowley scooped Aziraphale up and carried him over the threshold and into his flat, setting him down a few feet away from the stain and nudging the door shut with his foot. “Oh,” Aziraphale fluttered. “Oh, I—I hope I wasn’t too heavy.”

“As light as a feather, angel,” Crowley yawned. He stretched and scrubbed a hand through his hair, and then didn’t move away. He needed to be close to Aziraphale. Needed to be near him, to see him.

Aziraphale eyed the stain. “What happened?”

“I told you, they found out it was my fault. They came for me.”

“But you’re not powerful enough to...” Aziraphale stopped short, with a silent gasp, as though an invisible hand had just punched him in the stomach. “Oh lord.”

“I told you. I needed insurance. I knew I couldn’t keep them away on my own, when they came.”

“‘When’ they came? Even a hundred and sixty years ago, you were planning for this?”

“Yes. Well, not for _this_.” Crowley gave a boneless, all-encompassing shrug. “But for something. I’ve always been on borrowed time in Hell.”

* * *

“You’re exaggerating,” Aziraphale did not say, and he did not say it very emphatically. He couldn’t; the evidence that he had been wrong, that he had misunderstood for over a century and a half, was congealing there on the floor. 

“You never told me,” he did say, and felt an absolute heel, because he had never properly asked.

Crowley shrugged again, a mere twitch this time, and continued to gaze at Aziraphale from the space of a few inches away. He reminded Aziraphale of nothing so much as a half-open door, tantalizingly near, warning and beckoning at the same time. _Tempting…_

“Crowley? You’re, um.” 

“Looming? Sorry, bad demonic habit.”

“No, not looming, exactly. …But you are hovering.”

“Oh, well, excuse me,” he said, looking and sounding bizarrely insulted, as though ‘hovering’ was somehow worse behavior than ‘looming.’

“I don’t _mind_ you hovering, Crowley. But I’m concerned about precisely _why_ you’re hovering.”

Crowley made some nonsense noises and then remembered how to form words. “Do I need a reason? You got reembodied by the son of Satan. Maybe I’m just curious.”

“Granted, but you seem petrified at the thought of letting me out of your sight.”

“Because I am!” Crowley snapped. And then, “Oh, fuck it all,” he muttered, and dropped his head into his hands. 

“Tell me.”

“There's nothing to—” 

“Crowley.” Aziraphale’s quiet, plaintive insistence and beseeching eyes were a sledgehammer to Crowley’s self-restraint, as always, and as Aziraphale knew all too damned well. “Tell me.”

“...The smell of it, angel. The bookshop. It was in my nose, in my clothes, in my mouth, even after I left. The flames were still _licking_ at my _eyes_, and I couldn’t get away from it. I turned my back on the shop and drove away, but I was still _burning_. Wasn’t til I stopped driving, I realized... my eyes were burning because I was crying.”

Aziraphale let out a soft breath. “My dear fell—”

“You were _gone_! And the last thing you said to me was—” 

“‘I forgive you.’ Yes. It’s true, you know.”

“Don’t.” Crowley took off his glasses and tossed them onto the desk, and for a second or two they simply stared at each other. “I’m going to bed,” he said finally. 

“Do you have to?” Aziraphale’s hands fluttered at his sides, wanting to reach out, but chained by a few last fearful remnants of uncertainty. “If-if not seeing me bothers you right now, we can just sit here.” He gestured around and then realized that there was practically nowhere to sit. “Oh. Well, I can stand. And we do still have... things... to talk about. Besides, you had that nap on the bus. And you don’t really need to sleep.”

“Need’s got nothing to do with it. I sleep because I can, because in Hell, I _can’t_. No one can. No rest for the wicked.”

“Ah.” 

“Besides, this way I won’t bother you with my ‘hovering’.”

“Hover all you like.” The words slipped out before Aziraphale could stop them. His cheeks didn’t burn but his eyes and throat did. Then, hesitantly, “Do you dream?"

“Sometimes.” Crowley’s thin lips curved a little. “Sometimes they’re even pleasant.”

“Never could convince myself to try sleeping,” said Aziraphale. “It always seemed so... slothful.”

“Oh, well then, let me tempt you, angel. I can’t hover if we’re both lying down.”

“I really couldn’t impose—”

“You might as well. There’s nothing else for you to do here. I’ve got no books, there’s nothing interesting to eat, and as for drinking... I think you’ll want to be as sober as possible for whatever comes tomorrow. Besides, the bed’s big enough.” Crowley yawned and walked towards the bedroom, disposing of his clothing with a snap of his fingers. 

All of Aziraphale’s uncomfortable stirrings roared back, at the abrupt, skin-crinkling realization of what being private with Crowley could _also_ mean.

“Ah, Crowley—” He turned away quickly, and his hand fluttered up to shield his eyes. “Do you mind terribly?”

“Eh?” Crowley looked down. "Oh, for—it’s just a body, Aziraphale. Six thousand years, you must’ve seen at least one.” 

“Plenty, but…”

“You’ve seen this one before, too. Roman bath houses, Victorian bath houses… No reason to avert your eyes.” Crowley grinned tiredly. “What’s the matter, been a bit too long without giving in to your carnal appetites? Is the temptation too much?”

Aziraphale said nothing, and the demon’s smirk faded. 

In an instant, his nakedness was covered, this time by black silk pyjamas. He jerked his head at the door to the bedroom. “There’s some stuff in the bureau that should fit you.” His eyes, following Aziraphale as he slowly crossed the front room and into the bedroom, like a man about to meet a firing squad, were sad, and terribly gentle. “I’ll just step out while you change.”

“It’s fine, you can—”

The door closed. 

“—stay.”

The angel stood alone in Crowley’s bedroom.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which an angel tries on a demon's pyjamas, a prophecy is discussed, and some very obvious conclusions are drawn. Also there's kissing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided that this fic wouldn't benefit from being explicit, so the rating's been changed to 'Mature.'
> 
> **Edit: Now with artwork!**
> 
> Thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

Crowley leaned his forehead on the door for a moment or two, pressing his palm to the cement-coloured panel to steady himself. _Lead balloons all over again…_ he thought bleakly.

He’d been afraid of this for years. That the moment they left the safe liminal space of the bookstore and went together behind the solid, smooth gray walls of his flat at the top of the glass-fronted building, the consciousness of crossing into unknown, possibly unforgivable – by either side – territory, would make Aziraphale freeze. Again.

And he had. Again.

Granted, going suddenly starkers right in front of the angel probably hadn’t been his brightest moment, but he genuinely hadn’t thought that far ahead. Crowley tended not to pay much attention to his own fittings, apart from the rare occasions when he needed to use a toilet or adjust the fit of his trousers. And it wasn’t that he was _unaware_ of Aziraphale’s occasional... indulgences of the more fleshly sort, it was just, well...

He hadn’t every really thought about himself in that context, or imagined that Aziraphale would. Hand to Someone, he had only been _teasing_.

Mostly.

The truth was, if Aziraphale had responded to that half-joking little flirtation, Crowley knew he would have climbed him like the Tree of Good and Evil in the very next second. What might have happened after that, Crowley wasn’t quite sure. He wasn’t used to getting what he wanted and had never allowed himself to imagine what might come after ‘Yes.’

But Aziraphale had panicked at the overture, and Crowley had understood, and backed off, as he always did. He was patient; he could wait until Aziraphale was ready. He believed Aziraphale would meet him halfway, someday. They had all the time in the world.

Or they used to.

* * *

It was the second time in as many days that Aziraphale had forced Crowley to put up some kind of barrier between them: first at the bandstand by walking away, and now through simply closing a door.

“Buck up, Aziraphale,” he scolded himself, under his breath. “You’re acquiring bad habits. …Oh, well, that’s a bit rich, I suppose. Warning off a demon probably doesn’t quite count as a ‘bad’ habit.”

But it certainly wasn’t a habit he wanted to cultivate.

He glanced around the room with a guilty expression. It reminded him of the other lodgings of Crowley’s that Aziraphale had visited: bare. “I like being able to stand anywhere in a room and not touch anything without meaning to,” he’d once told Aziraphale, in an alcohol-assisted moment of more-than-usual confidence. This latest place was disquietingly bare, in fact, but with the modern attitude towards precision lines and spartan decoration, it at least looked… “Trendy,” Aziraphale shuddered.

Blacks, grays, reds, and here and there, a furtive hint of white. The bedside tables were free of dust. So were the lampshades and the mirror-topped bureau against one wall. The bed itself looked as though it had never been slept in. Aziraphale thought of his own rarely-used bedroom above the bookshop, which was largely inaccessible due to the door being long since blocked by bookcases, but he could always get in on the occasions when he needed to. Like the shop, it was never _quite_ free of dust, and he couldn’t recall the bedclothes ever being quite _that_ straight, no matter how hard he tried. But it was certainly comfortable enough.

Well. It had been comfortable enough. Before the fire.

Aziraphale looked at Crowley’s bed and felt something sharp in his throat. Crowley had spent more than a few nights in the room over the shop, over the years.

In six thousand years, he’d been in one or another of Crowley’s domiciles many times, but in the past century or so the standing invitation had been silently… not revoked, it wasn’t as though Crowley had told him _not_ to visit. But he had not been encouraged to visit, and Aziraphale’s own natural delicacy (more accurately, his deeply wounded pride) had prevented him from soliciting the invitation.

Besides, it wasn’t as though Crowley didn’t make himself free of the bookshop whenever he felt like. Which had happened with rather increased frequency since the arrival of the Antichrist.

There was a door in the far wall that, when he peeped inside, he discovered led to a bathroom. He eyed the bathtub longingly and then closed the door.

The other wall was one solid sheet of glass, looking out over Mayfair. That, more than the chill emptiness of the flat, made Aziraphale feel almost indecently exposed. It reminded him a bit too much of Head Office… but at least the gray and red were warmer than endless white

With nothing else to do, Aziraphale went to the bureau and pulled out a set of nightclothes. To his surprise, they were made of thick black silk. The fabric slithered wonderfully though his fingers.

Not being much of a sleeper, he hadn’t needed to wear pyjamas since, oh, sometime in the eighteen hundreds, and even then it was for the sheer novelty of trying out a new invention. And as for copious amounts of silk, that hadn’t been the fashion since... the Georgian period? But he wasn’t sure he had ever thought of wearing quite so much silk right next to his bare skin. It sounded almost intolerably decadent... sinful, even.

He set the nightclothes down again, and began, slowly, to undress.

When he finally slipped the pyjamas on, he expected them to be a bit snug around the middle, and too long in the arms and legs, and generally leave him looking ridiculous. But they fit perfectly.

Aziraphale looked into the mirror and almost blushed at his own reflection. He so rarely wore black, and with his almond cream-coloured curls mussed and the open-necked pyjama top, goodness… Not that he’d _never_ seen himself in such dishabille, and in someone else’s bedroom no less, but, well, this was _Crowley's_ bedroom, and after everything that had passed between them over the centuries, the last thing he wanted to do was take advantage of— 

There was a tap on the door. “You decent?”

“No—yes! I, that is, er… Yes.”

An audible pause made itself known. “Uh… you sure?”

“Yes. You can come in.”

He watched as Crowley slunk into the bedroom as though approaching something sordid and unpleasant, and didn’t look at him. “You alright?”

“Yes, perfectly. You… I’m sorry, Crowley.”

“Don’t worry about it. I forg—” The words snagged painfully in the demon’s throat. “I forgot about it already,” he finished instead, with an exaggerated yawn. “Must be more tired than I thought. C’mon, then. Get into bed, angel.”

Right. That was the entire point of this protracted torment. “Oh, I say, that’s—”

“Aziraphale.”

“But—” He wasn’t even sure why he was still protesting, but one thing stood out like neon in his brain. “But you don’t like touching anything without meaning to,” he insisted plaintively. He gazed at Crowley with wide, yearning blue eyes. “Won’t I keep you from sleeping?”

Crowley’s mouth attempted to make a string of meaningless, unintelligible noises, and failed. At last, he managed to utter words that were perfectly understandable. They were weighty words, and they hurt. “When,” he said, “have I ever touched you without meaning to?”

Aziraphale found he had no response.

* * *

Crowley waited until Aziraphale was settled on the window side of the bed (that was the side Crowley preferred to sleep on, but he was not about to mention it) and had tucked in the covers primly around himself, before circling round and slipping gratefully under the duvet. The soft mattress welcomed him like an old friend, the soft pillows and the soft… angel.

_Oh bugger._

Aziraphale was in his bed. Lying beside him.

If they survived tomorrow... how could Crowley possibly go back to an empty bed?

He had just ruined sleep and beds and bloody _pyjamas_ for himself for the literal rest of time.

* * *

Aziraphale held his breath for a very long time. It was ridiculous, they had sat beside one another on park benches and in Crowley’s late lamented car and on the bus with their thighs touching and their hands clasped, but this was… so different. Unspeakably different.

He did not even dare think the word ‘ineffable,’ but the ghost of it hovered above the bed somewhere, laughing at him.

Crowley lay on his back with his eyes half-closed (Aziraphale couldn’t remember the last time he’d even seen Crowley _blink_, let alone with his eyes closed) and his hands resting on the covers, and Aziraphale stared.

He couldn’t help it. He’d never allowed himself to indulge before, but now he glutted himself on the sight of Crowley’s hands, on the length of the fingers, the swollen knuckles, the dusting of freckles and the veins standing in bas relief... they were old hands, ancient and work-worn and tired, and once, long ago, they had helped to create the stars and cradle the world.

Aziraphale laid one of his own plump, soft, well-manicured hands tenderly beside Crowley’s on top of the duvet, and marveled at the contrast and how such beautiful dichotomy had nearly been snuffed out twice in a single day. He loved… those hands. Very dearly.

“Will you tell me what... well, what happened?”

“With the holy water, you mean?” Crowley stared at the ceiling. “Couple of old friends from Head Office stopped by for a chat. And by ‘chat,’ I mean they were here to tear me limb from limb. Ever had that happen to you, by the way? I have. I can’t say I recommend it. I only had enough for one of them, though.”

“I never saw you as the killing kind…” Crowley’s hands on the duvet twitched. “But under the circumstances, I absolutely can’t blame you.”

“I didn’t kill anybody. He did it to himself.”

“That’s rather splitting hairs, don’t you think?”

“Nope. I didn’t make Ligur step through that door and drop a bucket of holy water on his head. He could’ve come for me in the street or found me driving down the M5. Instead he tried to trap me in my home. Even a demon’s got a right to protect his own hearth, especially from the uninvited.”

Aziraphale swallowed the rather painful lump that was building in his throat. Yielding to temptation (it was becoming altogether too easy), he grasped Crowley’s hand impulsively.

They had touched so few times, over the centuries. Aziraphale had always held himself back, in spite of the compulsive yearning for physical contact that had plagued his entire existence, from touching Crowley, first by protocol, and then by politeness – Crowley had once described Hell’s dark, cramped offices and spoken of his delight in living on Earth where he could stretch his arms out for miles if he so chose and never touch another being – and finally, by fear: surely if holy water could obliterate a demon body and soul, then the touch of an angel would be agony to Crowley, at the very least. To say nothing of what the touch of a demon might do to Aziraphale…

But the answer was, now as it had always been, nothing.

Crowley’s hand was the same as it had been on the bus: cool to the touch, dry and smooth like the underbelly of a snake, and infinitely reassuring.

“I didn’t realize you wanted it for… protection. I thought... I always thought you—”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You never told me! You only ever said it was for ‘insurance,’ you never explained—”

Crowley rolled his eyes and then rolled over, turning his back resolutely to Aziraphale. After a few seconds he huffed and flopped onto his stomach, mashing his face into his pillow so that all Aziraphale could see of him was one yellow eye.

“If I _had_ asked,” Aziraphale continued, more quietly, responding to a chastisement both had thought (repeatedly) but neither had voiced, “would you have told me the truth?”

“...probably not,” Crowley muttered. “Not if I could’ve helped it. Wouldn’t have lied about it – directly – but I would have... strenuously avoided it.”

“I suppose that’s fair. I’d already proven I wasn’t to be trusted with such a revelation, not after I wounded you so deeply.”

“You sure wounded somebody. I wasn’t the one who deliberately kept their distance for eighty years.” Crowley’s voice was muffled by the pillow and devoid of accusation.

That made it worse, somehow.

“Was never about not trusting you. I‘ve always trusted you. Just... didn’t want to scare you.”

Aziraphale let out a deeply unangelic snort. “I spent the better part of a hundred and fifty years thinking that you wanted to obliterate yourself in every possible sense of the word. Telling me that you were scared of Hell coming after you because of the Arrangement would have frightened me _less_. We’d been expecting it, Crowley! Since the twelfth century!”

“I wasn’t worried about you being worried about _Hell._” Crowley raised himself up on his elbows to glare at Aziraphale. “I didn’t want you to figure out Heaven might do the same to you!”

The seconds ticked by.

“…Oh,” said Aziraphale, very softly.

“You see? That never even occurred to you, did it?”

Aziraphale’s eyes flicked away from Crowley’s abruptly gentle expression, his inexpressibly understanding gaze. “Not until recently... no.”

“How recently?”

“Today, I’m afraid. I always knew they’d be angry, of course, but I... I suppose I always assumed, in light of the greater good... but it turns out my notion of ‘the greater good’ is rather different from Heaven’s. And probably always has been.” A hint of confused bitterness crept into his next words. “But you’ve _always_ known that. You must’ve done. You never tried to make me believe it.”

“You wouldn’t have, before today. And... oh, angel, I never wanted you to." Crowley buried his face in his pillow again, but his words were as clear as a bell. "I let the whole of humanity see the difference between good and evil, and look how that turned out. I wasn’t about to do the same thing to you. I couldn’t stand the thought of what knowing would do to you. And I couldn’t be the one to do it. It would’ve destroyed you.”

“I gave you the holy water.”

“Yeah, but I _asked_ for that. If I’d actually intended to use it to kill myself, at least I knew what I was in for. I wasn’t going to force you. Into anything.”

“Well,” said Aziraphale, after a long and very uncomfortable silence, “I know now. And... it hurts. But I think I’ll survive. Unfortunately, Heaven likely has other plans.” Then he frowned. “Plans…”

“Mhmng. Hell, too.”

“Indeed.” He waited for Crowley to look up. “We’re as good as dead, you know.”

“I know. Um… Well then. Um. Angel, I—”

“Plans… plans!” Aziraphale sat up sharply. “Crowley. Earlier tonight, you asked, ‘what if The Almighty planned it all this way?’”

“I—and you said you wouldn’t put us past Them. So what? If we’ve reached the end of our Divine Usefulness—”

“And then Agnes’s prophecy? ‘Choose your faces wisely, for soon you will be playing with fire’? Her prophecies were literal to the point of ridiculousness—I literally found the Antichrist by adding a Tadfield area code to the Number of the Beast. That’s what she’s telling us: that we need to _choose_ our faces.”

“Well, it’s nice to finally be given an actual choice about something but…” Crowley’s jaw dropped. “Oh, no, it... it _can’t_ be that simple! Can it?” He twisted into an upright position, thinking aloud. “Fire… I drove through fire, your shop was torched, so what else can… hellfire.” He suddenly looked nauseous. “Heaven. They’re going to try and destroy you with hellfire.”

“It’d be fitting,” said Aziraphale grimly, able to be calm now that he had a better grasp on the details. “There isn’t much else that can destroy an angel. Which means that Hell—”

“Hell’s probably planning to do to me what I did to Ligur. But faces… I mean, we could do it. I’m pretty sure we could do it. But it might have some nasty results. And they’d never be fooled! …Would they?”

“I have no idea! And we’d have to, um. Well. Do it. In an ethereal sense, that is.”

“Do wha—oh. _Oh!_”

They stared at one another dumbly for several minutes, one of them blushing, the other going terribly pale. “Have you ever done that before?” asked Crowley at last, huskily.

“Never. There weren’t many opportunities, and that level of intimacy, it’s mortifying – in the most literal physical sense. I couldn’t… there wasn’t anyone else I—that is, erm. What about you?”

Crowley shook his head. He offered no details and Aziraphale didn’t ask. “And anyway, this is— We’d have to get every detail right. Tones of voice, speech patterns, body language – I mean, I can do it, I’ve only been staring at you and pining for six millennia. I know what you look like, sound like—”

“Smell like.”

“Uh, well, yeah.”

“What _do_ I smell like?”

“Um.” Sunshine on fresh soil. Rain on hot sand. Flowers. Fruit. Honey. The dust of ages. Life and hope. “Lotsa things, really. What do I smell like?”

“Hmm.” Aziraphale thought for a moment. “Underneath the leather and the cigarettes and the sulfur—”

“Come off it, I haven’t smoked cigarettes in years.”

“It’s the sort of smell that lingers. But underneath all of that… Cinnamon, predominantly. Now then—”

He bounded out of bed, while Crowley was still frowning and muttering, “Cinnamon?”

“It could work,” Aziraphale said, thinking aloud, pressing his fingers to his lips one moment and gesticulating the next. “If we—no, that’s ridiculous. But what about—hmm… Maybe if…”

“…So I’ll just go to sleep and hope you’ve worked it all out by morning, shall I?”

“No, stop.” Aziraphale shook himself like a perturbed spaniel. “Sorry, I need to backtrack – did you say ‘pining’?”

Crowley gawped at him. “Seriously? After all this time? You didn’t know?”

“Of course I _knew_,” said the angel, with a sudden, quiet intensity. “I’m not an idiot.”

“No, not an idiot,” Crowley agreed, and meant it.

“I knew, because I couldn’t _not_ know. Even coming from a demon. It’s not the sort of thing an angel can avoid sensing.” Aziraphale pivoted to the window. He pressed the palm of his hand to the plate glass and spread his fingers, needing something solid to touch. “I’ve known for a very long time. I don’t know when I started noticing but it was probably before you did. What I was never sure of was if the emotion was… welcome. If it was something that you embraced, or one that you simply… endured.”

“_We_ endured,” Crowley muttered.

Aziraphale turned round swiftly. “Yes, we have, haven’t we? Six thousand years of thinking and planning and _pining_. Endured it together. And yet, not together, because while you were pining, what was I doing? Using you, taking advantage of our friendship, keeping you at my beck and call, heedless of your needs and—why the hell are you laughing?”

* * *

Tears streamed down Crowley’s face as he whooped like a howler monkey, releasing the bottled-up emotions of six millennia into the room. He threw back the covers, twisted across the bed bonelessly and stood up to face Aziraphale, who looked at him as though he was about to break into a thousand small sharp fragments, his eyes full of regret and – and _longing_, Crowley realized, with a sharp breath that caught him full behind the breastbone and made the laughter abruptly cease.

“Aziraphale, I am a _demon_, and you’re an utter bastard sometimes, and I wouldn’t have you any other way, d’you hear me?” He gripped Aziraphale’s upper arms and shook him playfully. “Hear me?”

Then his maniacal grin switched off like a burnt-out light bulb. He seemed to crumple in on himself, and all of a sudden, he wrapped his arms around Aziraphale and pulled him into a ferocious embrace.

“I couldn’t find you,” he mumbled, his voice muffled by bright soft hair. “I always know where you are, I can always _feel_ you... but I couldn’t find you. I thought you were dead – really truly altogether dead. And the bookshop was burning. It felt like they were trying to erase you from history. Trying to make it so that you never existed at all. I thought I’d lost… I did lose you.”

Aziraphale tightened his arms around Crowley’s ribs. “I wasn’t lost, you know. Not really. I just got myself misplaced for a little bit, while I found my way back to you. I _had_ to find you, even if I had to go to Alpha Centauri to do it. I was rather surprised to find you still on Earth. And that you’re still here, even after… well, everything that happened today.”

“If I couldn’t leave before, there’s no chance in Hell or Heaven that I’m leaving now. I’m not going anywhere, angel. I’m not. Not without you. Not this time. Never again.”

“Crowley, I... you know, I’m, I’m rather...”

The demon’s lips twitched. “Fond of me?”

Aziraphale seemed to draw strength from the gentle teasing. “That, yes. And more. The fact is, Crowley... I love you.”

“…I you ah… _wha…_”

And then whatever else Crowley had been about to say suddenly fled from his mind and never returned, because Aziraphale backed him against the edge of the bed and kissed him. And Crowley melted.

  
** [Art by glitchingicarus on Tumblr](https://glitchingicarus.tumblr.com/post/187192542687/a-little-bit-of-uncertainty-a-touch-of) **

It was as near as he ever got to describing the feeling that overcame him in one great sonorous wave. It was the complete release – the complete relief – of giving yourself over to someone you loved with every spark in your ineffable soul and every fibre in your very tired human-looking body, someone you could rely on to see for you when you were blind and breathe for you when you were drowning and be your exoskeleton when your own bones couldn’t do the job anymore.

It didn’t feel new, didn’t feel like a first kiss. It was gentle and tired and unhurried. It felt like rest. Crowley curled his hands into the fabric of Aziraphale’s shirt, and let the tension of centuries and especially of the last twenty-four hours bleed away.

And when Aziraphale pulled away, all too soon, Crowley let out a whimper and tried to hang on, following Aziraphale’s mouth with his own.

* * *

That had been – well, not unimaginable, Aziraphale had been imagining snogging Crowley for the last few centuries, and in great detail for the past three or four decades. And not unconsidered, either, for the same reasons. Unexpected, perhaps? He hadn’t precisely planned to declare his affections quite so plainly… at least, not tonight.

Then again, there might not be another opportunity, so perhaps it was all for the best—

Crowley was gazing at him in the most slack-jawed manner. “Angel,” he said. “Kiss. More.”

“Oh, my—my _dear_, I don’t think we have time.”

So Crowley stopped time.

It was talent peculiar to him, though whether it was specific to his demonic existence or something left over from his time as an angel, Aziraphale wasn’t sure and had never worked up the nerve to ask. But it had saved his life a time or two, it had helped to save the world, and now...

And... _now_. With Crowley’s lips pressed firmly to his, moving hesitantly but gladly, and his hands moving from Aziraphale’s back to his hair… what was time, after all, to an angel and a demon who had nothing left to lose but what they could hold in their two hands?

A few minutes later (or perhaps several thousand years had passed?), Aziraphale was once again the one who broke the kiss, gently and reluctantly. But he kept his hands fisted in Crowley’s pyjama top, all the same. “My dear, this is all intolerably lovely, but I think we’ve gotten sidetracked.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An angel and a demon, who love each other very much, have The Talk. (Sort of.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter because I'm on vacation! *\o/* Also, I have a twitter for my fanfic now! Please follow me for updates and complaining. 
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

It was not, Aziraphale realized belatedly, the first time they had ever shared a bed. There had been one other occasion, in the fourteenth century… at least, he was reasonably sure that had happened. He had been desperately injured at the time, in danger of discorporation, and while he couldn’t recall much of what happened after he’d gallantly stepped between Crowley and a very annoyed demon wielding an ugly black knife, he did seem to remember something about waking up beside a gently snoring Crowley, aching but whole, and curling an arm around Crowley’s bare chest.

He’d all but forgotten it. Neither of them particularly enjoyed thinking about that span of years. But as they slowly disentangled their arms and climbed back into bed, and gingerly re-entangled their arms – it was somehow more awkward to accomplish, now that they were thinking about it – the memory came seeping back. 

Crowley had saved him. Not merely from discorporation, but from death. 

Tenderly, Aziraphale reached out and touched Crowley’s cheekbone with his fingertips. This time when their skin connected, he felt something, small and warm and bright, that sparked between them, made it harder than ever to pull away. “We were talking about something, before the kissing.”

Crowley’s eyes were luminous in the dim room. Ambient city light from the window highlighted the sharp angles of his face but left the hollows in shadow. “We were, yeah. About… well. Sex. Of varying sorts. And about dying horribly at the hands of our respective sides.”

“Right.” Aziraphale moistened his lips. “So… neither of us have ever been… intimate…” He wasn’t sure what made him linger over the word. He only knew it wasn’t shame. “With any of our own, er, persuasion. Side. Species?”

“Or anyone else. For my part,” Crowley added, with some dry amusement.

Aziraphale heard the words but missed the tone. “You’ve never tried it? Really?”

“Nope. Well, once. Before the Flood. And it was, y’know, a thing to do. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But eh, copulation, not really my thing. Didn’t see much point in it for me. At least not with humans,” he added, under his breath. “And then after all that business with the Nephilim...” He and Aziraphale shuddered. “And there’ve been a few demons through the ages who’ve gotten their jollies on with some unsuspecting humans.” 

“Yes, I remember you’ve complained in the past about having to, well, shepherd the offspring of such unions. I can imagine—”

“You can’t. Not really.”

“I was going to say, I can imagine that didn’t work out well for any of the humans involved.”

Crowley grimaced. “Ehh, you’re not wrong. I’ve seen what humans do to the children of humans and demons, and we’ve both seen what Upstairs does to angels and humans who, uh… spawn. Or who even just form an attachment. Really puts them in a foul mood. I’d hate to think...” His eyebrows went up inquisitively. “Why, have you?”

“...Crowley, not even an hour ago you were taunting me for my ‘carnal appetites’ and now you’re asking me if I have actually had intimate relations with humans?”

“I didn’t want to assume!”

“Of course I have. You _know_ I have,” he added, a little awkwardly, not wanting to bring up the late 1880s.

“No, I _assumed_ you have.” Although, looking back, Aziraphale realized there had been a few moments over the centuries that made Crowley’s insistence on precise language a bit much. “Can’t imagine there’re many earthly delights you haven’t tried, by now.”

“Just about all of them, I should think.”[1]

Crowley looked at him steadily. Then, after a few moments, and rather diffidently, “What d’you think of it?”

“Of copulation? It’s...” Aziraphale frowned for a moment. Then his face lit up. “It’s rather fun.”

“‘Fun’?” repeated Crowley with distaste. “What, like doing terrible sleight of hand?”

“A bit like that, yes. But when you do it right, it’s also quite... decadent? Rich, you know, like a very dense chocolate gateau.” Or black silk pyjamas over bare skin. “It’s lovely while it lasts, and then it lasts a very long time. I rather glutted myself, the last time I… indulged. Haven’t needed seconds since.”

“How long’s that been?”

“Oh, well over a century.”

“...And you’ve really only been with humans?”

For the third or possibly fourth time that night, Aziraphale blushed. Not so much at the question, but the way Crowley looked at him when he asked it. As though he couldn’t begin to imagine who in Heaven would pass over the Principality Aziraphale for intimate acts of celestial ecstasy and leave him to the mercy of humans and their fumbling physicalities. 

“Who else but humans? It’s not as if any of my side are all that interested in, as you say, earthly pleasures.”

Crowley pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling. “I might be. Interested. In, y’know. The human method. With you.”

Aziraphale’s brain suddenly made a sound surprisingly similar to the noise his trusty IBM computer made when it was trying to connect to the internet. “I... With me?”

* * *

“But you just said…”

“I know what I said. And if we can live til the day after tomorrow… well, I can’t really picture doing it with anyone else. And you can’t tell me you’ve never thought of doing it with me, because we both know it’d be a lie. Angels sense virtues. Demons sense vice. So, yes, Aziraphale, I have occasionally sensed your desire to throw me across the nearest stack of books and have your way with me—”

_“Crowley!”_

“—which, by the way, is not a very angelic thing to feel—”

“I never—”

“Now you’re just plain lying. Also not very angelic. And that wouldn’t be a very nice thing to do to the books. Or to me, come to think of it. I’d prefer something a little more comfortable.”

“You knew... and you did nothing. That would have been quite a triumph for you. Seducing an angel.”

One of Crowley’s shoulders twitched in a shrug. “Wasn’t what I wanted.”

Aziraphale blinked rapidly, and then gathered himself together and shook his head. “I never wanted to do... what you just implied. The part about having you over a stack of books. When I let myself think such things, I never pictured it as something sordid and rushed. I wanted... oh, damn. And we’ve gotten off-topic again!”

“Angel?” Crowley started to prop himself up, worrying at his lower lip with one too-sharp canine. “Tell me?”

“I wanted – I want – _you_.” He wriggled even closer against Crowley and pulled him back down, until they were nose-to-nose and breathing the same air. “Carnally, yes, if that's something you want as well, but however I can have you, I want you. Spiritually... fully. Gently. To-to be _allowed_ to cherish you.” 

This time, it was Crowley who pulled them together and pressed his lips to Aziraphale’s, stopping the angel’s confession before it doomed them any further. He slid his hands into the soft white-blond hair, felt Aziraphale’s hands on his face and his fingers working between his face and the pillow to trace the black tattoo on his temple.

And there it was again, the strange bright elusive energy urging them inexorably towards one another, and the temptation to yield to it, to sink his very being into Aziraphale, was becoming almost too much to withstand. Crowley broke the kiss with a gasp and stared down into blue eyes that were so full of tenderness and desire and _knew it_ that he ached from his soul outward. 

“That’s not… that’s, uh. Not?”

Aziraphale moistened his lips. “Well,” he said, his voice dropping into a warm, husky timbre Crowley had never heard from him before, “that’s new. But from what I’ve heard from the others at Head Office – water cooler gossip, you know – that’s about how it starts.”

“So, what, what do we—? I mean, I’ve never and you’ve never, I-wuh, I’ve barely done it with humans and I’m talking too much, and you’re not talking enough, and this is weird and I’m scared.”

“Crowley. Anthony.” Crowley responded with a downright needy whine that surprised them both, himself most of all. It was just a name, an alias, it wasn’t him… but on the angel’s lips, it was like a balm. “It’s all right. I’ve got you. We’ll figure it out.” Aziraphale’s smile was soft and beatific and knowing, and not the least bit erotic, and in spite of that, Crowley was dry-mouthed and twitching, and everything inside his abdomen was writhing with desperation and need. 

“I won’t let you fall.” Aziraphale swallowed hard. “Not alone, at any rate.”

A sick, chilly wave crashed over Crowley. “Oh, _hell…_”

“Are you nervous?”

“Nervous, yeah... terrified, more like.”

“Why?”

What could Crowley even say to that? “You know this might not work,” he managed, at last. “Angel… demon… We still might explode.”

The hands Aziraphale smoothed oh so gently over his face and chest and arms were calm and assured, and even mostly steady. “Then at least we won’t have to worry about tomorrow. Just try to relax.”

“I… I don’t think I can.”

“…Are you frightened of me, Crowley?”

“Not _of_ you,” he insisted, “I just... I want thisss, fuck, _this_ to be good. For you. I want, I want it to be perfect, and I’m, I can’t, I _can’t_—”

Aziraphale drew him close and Crowley gasped, low and shallow in his throat, at the sensation of skin on skin as the silk between them disappeared. “Nothing needs to be perfect. Not for me. I’m not going to be perfect for you.”

“You’re already perfect,” muttered Crowley, blushing redder than his hair. “It’s just... it’s so stupid. I’ve been—oh...”

“I know.” Warm lips on cool skin. “I know. Six thousand years of thinking and planning and longing. I _know_, Crowley.”

“I never thought we’d get this far. Never thought we’d get the chance.” Aziraphale nodded and then hummed with satisfaction when Crowley rested tentative hands on his bare back. “Good?”

“Good. You?”

“Good.” Crowley took a moment to catch his breath and then laughed, a short sharp bark that Aziraphale knew well. 

“Once more unto the breach, then, hmm?”

“Ugh, I _hate_ the gloomy ones—”

“You’re missing the point, dearest,” Aziraphale said, silencing Crowley’s lips very decisively.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Of the many delights Earth has to offer, Aziraphale has never tried the following: 1) Injectable recreational substances (reason: he doesn’t like needles); 2) durian (reason: the smell); and 3) oxygen bars (reason: because they’re ridiculous). [back]


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When an angel and a demon love each other very much... **(This is the chapter with The Sex. It's not explicit at all but it's there.)**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been a very long 2+ months. *falls over*
> 
> [Fanfic Twitter](https://twitter.com/gaslightgallow1): because Tumblr hate links. Please follow me for updates and complaining.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

Aziraphale, at least, had some secondhand knowledge of how the thing was supposed to be done – and more recent knowledge than Crowley, whose understanding of celestial coupling was six thousand years out of date. “Although,” he added, after a few seconds of mulling it over, “it’s probably the sort of thing that doesn’t really change much. 

“I would imagine not,” agreed Aziraphale, mischief and desire mingling in his mouth in unfamiliar ways. “The same as human coupling. Acts and numbers of partners go in and out of vogue, but the essentials, at least in my experience, remain reassuringly the same.” He stroked his palms slowly up Crowley’s bare biceps and over his shoulders, letting his thumbs drift over the ridges of the collarbones and the little hollows above them. The sight wasn’t unfamiliar – Crowley hadn’t been joking about the bath houses – but the touching, oh, the touching. It felt, well, rather wicked, if Aziraphale was being honest with himself (which, for once, he was; it seemed as good a time as any to begin the practice), but only in a gluttonous sense, much in the same way eating an amazing four-course dinner with perfectly chosen wines and then splurging on cake afterwards was wicked. He might theoretically regret the indulgence, but in practice, he was only sorry his stomach wasn’t bigger. “And demons don’t, er – typically go in for this sort of thing?”

“Nnh?” said Crowley, sounding a bit strained. He was panting, Aziraphale realized. (And he was just enough of a bastard to feel very smug about that.) “This, uh…”

“The mortifying ordeal, et cetera.”

“Oh. Oh! No. Fuck no. As a rule, demons don’t really want anybody to know them. In any fashion.”

* * *

Crowley gulped shallowly but determinedly and pulled Aziraphale closer, trying to hold onto him and them and _this_ for as long as possible, and still chase down that urgent, driving energy humming between them that insisted they weren’t yet close _enough_. Aziraphale’s soft hands were wandering over his upper body, gently exploring what he had always been able to imagine and sometimes to see but never touch, and Crowley was getting drunk on the feel of his hands, soft and gentle and exhilarating and – maybe – just the tiniest bit…

Oh yes, there it was. The angel was coveting him. Awful, shocking bad form for an angel, covetousness, and the professional in him positively cackled with pride at having tempted an angel into such a sin.

Then again, it wasn’t as though Crowley was already taken, so maybe coveting someone who was free for the taking was okay. And if anyone had a right—no, not quite a right. But if there was anyone who Crowley could imagine wanting to be coveted by, it was Aziraphale, always and only Aziraphale. 

“Demons – most demons – don’t want to be bothered with knowing about anyone else. They don’t care. They can’t.” He caught Aziraphale’s hands as they feathered over his belly and held them, lacing their fingers together between their bodies. “Caring’s bad. Makes you vulnerable. Plenty downstairs might fuck each other out of boredom – it’s so cramped down there that sometimes it’s hard to avoid it – but that essential kind of merging…. I’ve never heard of anyone trying it, or even wanting to try it.”

He sounded so sickeningly lonesome even to himself, he wasn’t really surprised when Aziraphale stretched up to kiss him. He might even be accused of making himself sound extra pathetic in order to tempt Aziraphale into kissing him again. But he hadn’t, that was the thing. It was, he thought bitterly, only the bald truth: Hell was a place of punishment, after all, and he had learned that there were worse things for him than hellfire. 

But his angel was kissing him and wrapping him up in his arms. There was a tantalizing hint of ozone in the air, getting stronger by the second, that told Crowley that his angel was close to losing control of himself altogether, and any bitterness he still felt from his abandonment by the Almighty or the way Heaven had treated this remarkable creature was overpowered by the weight of sly determined sweetness. Aziraphale unleashed was like being embraced by a passionate meringue, Crowley decided, and it was wonderful. 

“I think,” he managed, between kisses that began to taste as well as smell of ozone, “something’s going to happen soon?”

“I think so, yes.” Aziraphale’s curls were mussed and wild, and his eyes darkened and danced in anticipation. “Best get back to bed.”

“…I’m not arguing, but do we _need_ to be lying down for this?”

“Probably not, but it can’t hurt.”

He let Aziraphale tug him back to the bed and then fold around him like a possessive duvet, filling his nostrils with the scent of him, old book and dust and peppermint and new cologne and pears, and beyond that, more ineffable scents. Lightning hovering overhead, waiting to strike, and star-singed feathers, and the way the ice in a comet’s tail tickled his nose. 

“Crowley?” Well-kept hands framed his face. “You’re trembling.”

“It’s… I’m…” _I’m scared, angel. I’m terrified. It’s exactly what I want and I’m so scared it’ll come flying apart._ “I’m fine.”

“We can stop.”

“No! …Don’t let go.”

“I have you.”

Aziraphale pulled him even closer at the same time Crowley pressed against his body, and then the lightning seemed to strike home, and the angel and the demon simply… melted, the one into the other. 

* * *

There was no explosion. 

Or perhaps, as Crowley’s very being folded around him and Aziraphale felt the last of his doubts burning away, there was. 

If an explosion could be peaceful. If it could be warm and soft and _safe_. If it could blot out every possible sound except the beating heart of the universe and the slight vibrations that he and Crowley caused to tremble within the cosmos. 

If…

* * *

“Oh,” they sighed, as one being, as infinite beings, and flung themself into the cosmos. 

They were alive with desire and delight, aflame with an incalculable feeling of wholeness and fullness and a sense of Knowing each other fully for the very first time, and they were soothed by that, even as they burned like phoenixes among the stars. 

Not much of the Knowing was a surprise, after having been in and out of one another’s lives for six thousand years, but there were still some things that were new. They saw the memories, ancient and recent, of the human friends they had each had over the centuries, fleeting flickers of light who they had loved for a short time and then grieved for. 

Most had gone to Heaven, eventually, and a few had gone to Hell, but whether infernal or ethereal, those souls were lost to Aziraphale and Crowley. The realms of human souls were not places either of them were allowed to tread. 

And there were even more distant recollections, from before time had truly gotten underway, of how they had both been in Heaven, before the War and before the Fall. 

Aziraphale laid his rusty memories bare for Crowley to see and take for his own, memories of the War that he wished he could forget, but that were a part of him. He gave them willingly, sensing that Crowley had nothing from that time that he could give in return; indeed, Crowley had a barrier around his own memories of his life in Heaven that Aziraphale was reluctant to try and cross… though he got a glimpse, brief and beautiful, of a brown-haired angel laughing delightedly in the midst of a nebula being born. 

But it wasn’t any angel that Aziraphale recognized from Heaven’s records, and then Crowley jerked the memory back and it was gone, so thoroughly that Aziraphale could only remember that he’d forgotten something exquisite, and sad. 

“Angel… angel, I need a break.”

“Yes, me too,” said Aziraphale, tentatively, surprised at how loud his voice was and how breathless he also sounded. (The sound was oddly internal; his ears seemed to no longer be functioning in the usual way.) “D’you think… oh dear. Crowley, I don’t want to _stop_ but do you know if there’s a way for us to, uh… manifest separately? So we can see one another?”

“Uh… not sure, but maybe try—?”

Aziraphale felt a sharp moment of dizziness and was suddenly conscious of a very odd sensation of being in two places at once—he was inside of Crowley and looking out, but he was also outside of Crowley, looking in—and of being nowhere in particular. “Oh…”

It was just the two of them, standing (existing?) within a vast ocean of stars, and their very essences still so entangled with one another that Aziraphale’s own eyes (Crowley could see) had gone a disquieting serpentine yellow, and Crowley’s eyes, Aziraphale marveled, had become, not blue like his own, but brown. 

“Was this the colour of your eyes,” he murmured, stroking Crowley’s face with his fingertips, “when the world was new and we were new?”

* * *

“Maybe it was,” said Crowley hoarsely. “I can hardly remember… And you? Was that really you at the head of that battalion?” 

“It was. I wish I could say it was not. But I led and I fought, and somehow we managed to drive back Hell’s forces from our position without actually destroying any of them. I told you, I’ve never killed anything.”

“I know, but I thought you meant earthly things…” Crowley shook his head. “How can you know someone for so long and still realize there are things about them you never knew?”

A soft kiss on the side of his neck nearly sent him to his knees, it resonated with so much emotion and power. “Endless mysteries,” Aziraphale murmured, catching him and keeping him from falling.

They came together again as only angels can, in light. Aziraphale was aglow with arousal and desire, and when he was consumed by ecstasy, the light engulfed Crowley. It ought to have burned a demon to ashes, but he only wept, surrounded by the absolute love and acceptance of the one person in Creation who had made his life mean something, and, well… it was ineffable. 

“I had a feeling we’d make it work,” said the angel smugly, some indeterminate time later, as they sat amidst the stars with their wings curving round one another. 

Crowley narrowed his eyes. “Did you? Or are you just saying that because we _didn’t_ obliterate ourselves?”

Aziraphale had the good sense to look at least a little abashed. “Well… Milton got it mostly right, you know. So if a human could imagine angelic intimacy so accurately, then surely we…” Crowley suddenly looked very embarrassed himself. “Oh, so _that’s_ how Milton was so on the nose with everything!”

“Not _everything,_” Crowley insisted. “I left a lot out!”

“So you did – not even a word about your old friend Aziraphale.”

“No, you’re in it, I swear, I just…” Crowley’s shoulders squirmed in the most snake-like of uncomfortable shrugs, ruffling his half of their cocoon of feathers. “I just called you by a different name. Raphael, you know.”

“Ahh, well, that explains things. I was wondering where Milton found him.” Aziraphale pressed closer to his side and gazed thoughtfully at the warm, soft tent their wings had made. 

“They’re still black.”

“Eh? Oh, yeah… always have been.”

“Really? I’ve never seen an angel with black wings before,” he murmured, gently petting the sooty feathers. 

Crowley rested his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder and hummed softly. “Back before the Fall, the wings of the angels were all different colours. Millions upon millions of colours. Colours you can’t even put names to anymore. They’re all gone, just… burned away.” 

“I’ve only ever seen angels with white wings,” said Aziraphale wistfully. “I suppose the peacock style has gone out of fashion.”

“You sound sad.”

“I am, rather. It’s so drab up there. Nothing but white and cream and every conceivable shade of beige, and the occasional pastel purple, and bits of gold leaf applied tastefully. It would be nice to see all the heavenly host looking a little more lively.”

“Mhmm. Maybe if your lot could have a little more fun, things’d be better for everyone.”

“Yes. Perhaps we – we all – wouldn’t have quite so much to regret.”

Crowley snorted. “That’s rich. As if your side or mine ever bothers with regrets. That’d mean admitting they were wrong. ‘S not gonna happen. But as for me? I’ve got nothing to apologize for.” He laced their fingers together. “And neither have you.”

“Don’t we?” But Aziraphale didn’t sound so sure. 

“Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. What more can they do to me? I won’t apologize for loving you.”

Aziraphale let out a tiny moan. “Crowley… have you really… All this time?”

“You said you knew.” 

“I said I noticed. But I don’t really remember when I began to notice... Was it so long? Truly?”

“Always. In all the time we’ve known each other, there’s never been a moment that I didn’t love you.”

“Even in the beginning?”

“Even then.”

“But why?”

“You smiled at me.”

“…That’s it?”

“You’re kind. You weren’t made to be, but you want to be, and you’ve worked _so hard_ to be kind and to stay kind. It would’ve been hard not to fall for that kind of devotion.”

“You’ve already fallen once,” Aziraphale murmured, stroking his fingers over the rise of Crowley’s cheekbones. 

“Twice,” he corrected. “Once from Heaven. Once _to you_. The first was the worst thing that happened to me.” 

“And the second?”

Crowley grinned, suddenly and sharply and not at all pleasantly. “I’ve spent a lot of time hating it.”

“Hating… me?”

“No, not hating you! Hating that I love you. It’s so annoying, how you make my shitty existence so much harder. But you make my hard, shitty life so so so much better. I used to wish I’d never met you, but I _did_ meet you, and now I wouldn’t undo that for the world.” Suddenly overwhelmed, Crowley flushed red and buried his face in the crook of Aziraphale’s neck.

“I’m sorry...” Aziraphale murmured, closing his eyes and holding Crowley tightly. “I’m so sorry. I was afraid.”

“Of?”

“Of what would happen to you.”

Crowley smiled. “Always worried about me, never worried about yourself.”

“Foolish, I know. But it never occurred to be before that Heaven…” Aziraphale shivered. “I’m sorry. We could have had centuries together, if not for...”

“Shh,” Crowley flicked a gentle forked tongue over the pulse in Aziraphale’s throat. “We did have centuries. We’ve had all of time.”

And he marveled at the beautiful contradiction of his angel, so soft and uncompounded, the contrast between softness of Aziraphale’s skin and the power humming through him that he almost never used because he so desperately wanted to be kind.

That same ineffable power that flowed through him and out of him, crashing into an answering power in Crowley like waves, energy building and mounting until the stars around them went careening in fire to Earth, and the angel and the demon with them.

They were back in Crowley’s bed, in his flat, clinging to one another amidst the tangled black sheets, with the smell of ozone hanging in the air like the aftermath of a lightning strike.

After all they had just experienced together, physical union seemed both an insipid imitation of ecstasy and the natural progression of things past to things present, and Crowley gave himself over gladly to his angel’s touch. “I honestly never thought we’d get this far,” he admitted, when they were together, as they had both once watched Adam and Eve come together. “Never thought we’d get the chance.” Aziraphale nodded and then hummed with satisfaction when Crowley rested tentative hands on his bare back. “Good?”

“Good. You?”

“Good.”

Aziraphale was as soft and warm as he’d always imagined (coveting was a sin, it was what he did, of course he’d imagined), and angelic lips trailing kisses over the insides of his wrists and the fragile skin in the crook of his elbow and the crease of his thigh like feathers brushing over silk, and leaving sparks. 

Every kiss and touch in every intimate place (every place was intimate when you’d spent so many centuries longing to touch and barely daring to shake hands) ought to have burned, and did burn, but nothing hurt, and their faces began again to shift back and forth, until Crowley barely knew where he stopped and Aziraphale started.

* * *

Crowley’s face kept shifting and Aziraphale assumed his own must be doing the same, and he wasn’t always sure who he was looking at – at Crowley, at himself, at God, at—

“God,” Aziraphale exhaled, as Crowley threw back his head and clenched around him, and if She heard him invoking Her name, well, so be it. 

He couldn’t – wouldn’t – believe any longer that loving a demon was wrong. It had to be part of the Divine—no, the _Ineffable_ Plan. There was no guilt anymore, no shame, no regrets – only Crowley and safety and acceptance and _love_.

* * *

Aziraphale reared back with a cry. His wings snapped open to their full spread, billowing like clouds and stretching from one side of the room to the other, from ceiling to floor. 

Crowley gazed up at him in wonder, exhausted, astonished, and adoring. 

There had to be something blasphemous about being fucked by an angel, but it felt more like a blessing. Besides, he was a demon. It was his job to be blasphemous.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most serious afterglow ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gotta finish this before anything **else** happens. :P
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

“That was... that was... different.”

Crowley glanced down at the cloud of curls pillowed on his chest, and gnawed his lower lip with one apprehensive fang. They had been quiet for ages, catching their breath together, still silently reveling at the feeling of their corporeal bodies against one another and doing their best not to run screaming in opposite directions at the weight of the emotions they now had to process. 

“Different, different how?” he ventured. “Good-different, bad-different? …Indifferent-different?”

Aziraphale’s still-reddened lips were pursed in thought. “In my previous encounters, it was all very… experimental. A part of the human experience. A mildly pleasant pastime, nothing more. I’ve never been intimate with anyone I cared this much for. This felt… meaningful.”

“Ineffable?”

“No. Ineffable means unknowable. And we now know each other quite thoroughly.”

The demon snorted fondly. “One might even say, biblically.”

“Hush. Not like that, like... like... oh, there just isn’t any way to describe it without sounding rude. And I couldn’t do that, not when it felt so hol—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.”

Aziraphale fell silent for a time. Then, very softly, his voice muffled against Crowley’s chest, “There definitely aren’t words for what we’ve just experienced.”

He felt Crowley’s lips against his hair. “How could there be? No one’s ever done that before. No angels and demons... It’s something new.”

Aziraphale reached up trailed his fingers across Crowley’s cheekbone, watching the ghost of his own face as they passed over Crowley’s skin. “I wonder if this is what I was always unconsciously afraid of,” he murmured. “Getting too close, and discovering how similar we truly are, under the surface.”

“Stupid thing to be scared of,” Crowley scoffed, but gently. He pressed his palm to Aziraphale’s right temple, and when he lifted it away, for a few seconds he saw the point of a red sideburn and a black serpent mark, before they was swallowed up by white and gold. “I’ve always known it.”

Aziraphale (as Crowley) let out a quiet snort. “Well, Gabriel did call me ‘soft,’” he murmured, moving his hands slowly over Crowley (as Aziraphale)'s body.

“You are soft. ‘S why I love you. Why I’ve always loved you. You stayed soft.” 

“That’s not what Gabriel meant, I’m afraid.”

“Bugger Gabriel,” Crowley replied shortly in Aziraphale’s voice (causing the real Aziraphale to glare in disapproval at the vulgarity). “It’s what _I_ meant.”

Aziraphale took his own face back and stretched up to kiss him. “This is delightful, but the night won’t last forever. We need to discuss our tactical stratagems.” 

They lay naked in Crowley’s bed and went over and over what they should do next and what they thought they could reasonably get away with, and if their tactical stratagems were occasionally interrupted by more pleasant diversions, that was their business. 

“Regardless of how this plays out, it’s going to end with you being dragged into Hell.”

“Yes, and with you being hauled bodily into Heaven. Is that even still possible? Can you—will you be all right, Crowley?”

“Pfft. Shouldn’t be too bad. A bit itchy, maybe, at least until they get around to trying to execute me. You. Me-as-you. Speaking of, what about you? You’re not exactly built for the infernal regions, you know.”

“Perhaps not, but divine righteousness makes for a surprisingly formidable armor. Barring anything too unforeseen, I should be fine.”

“It’s a danger,” said Crowley, not especially reassured, “but it’s the best plan we’ve got.”

“It’s always been a danger. _I’ve_ always been a danger,” Aziraphale amended, “to you. That’s-that’s why I stayed silent, you know. I was afraid of—well, of more or less precisely what’s happened, apart from Armageddon.”

“I know, angel,” Crowley said softly. “You’ve always been a risk to me, and vice versa… though you don’t seem to care much about the versa.”

Aziraphale chuckled a bit, though the sentiment didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, you know me, my dear. I’m terrible at self-preservation.”

“Only when I’m around,” Crowley snorted. Then he gulped and rushed ahead before he could lose his nerve. “But you’ve been worth it, Aziraphale. You’ve been so worth it.”

His angel pressed a warm, slow kiss to his lips. “So have you.”

“I always figured they’d get me first. Always planned on it. Never cared much, until... ‘til I wasn’t the one they got first.”

“Shh.” Aziraphale pressed his forehead to Crowley’s. “We can’t give up now.”

“I don’t plan to. I’m with you, angel. To—” Crowley was interrupted by a huge yawn. “To the end.”

They went over their next day’s plan again, until Crowley was yawning hard enough to dislocate his jaw, which it would have, if he didn’t have expandable jaws, which even to Aziraphale was a very disconcerting thing to see in a human-shaped person. “You actually should get some sleep,” he said regretfully, peeling himself away from Crowley’s lean frame and miracling himself a fluffy cream-and-gold dressing gown (and matching slippers).

“I know, I feel it, but…” Crowley made some unwilling noises. “Can’t seem to convince myself.”

A little smile touched Aziraphale’s lips. “I’ll still be here when you wake up, you know.”

“Promise me.” 

“I promise. I’ll even read to you, if you like. Anything you want—well, anything you’ve got on-hand. I know you don’t ‘do’ books.”

The knowing little gleam in his eyes said otherwise, and Crowley couldn’t help grumbling under his breath about being so—so _known_. But he could either ride his pride to bed or listen to Aziraphale’s voice while he fell asleep, and it wasn’t too difficult of a decision to make. 

He produced a dog-eared copy of _Much Ado About Nothing_ for Aziraphale, then pulled the duvet up to his chin and curled into a tight ball. “Don’t forget to use OP,” he said sleepily. “Shakespeare hasn’t sounded right since the Great Vowel Shift.”

“That’s your own fault, you know.”

“Mhmm.” 

He was asleep before Aziraphale had gotten much further than, ‘Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.’ Perhaps miraculously, he had no dreams that night, and no nightmares, either. 

And Aziraphale was there when he woke in the morning, as promised, curled against his back like a shield. 

Crowley felt… strange. Blissfully warm. Comfortable, terrifyingly safe, and… 

Peaceful.

He pressed his hands to Aziraphale’s, folded over his stomach, closed his eyes again. He wanted to remember this, just in case, for the rest of his now very-endangered life. 

Aziraphale’s stomach rumbled against his spine. 

“Er,” said Aziraphale. “Sorry, darling. I’m a bit peckish, I’m afraid.”

Crowley groaned and pulled the duvet over his head. “Go raid the fridge, angel.”

“Is there anything in it?”

“Yes,” said Crowley, with a muffled snap of his fingers. 

Aziraphale hesitated a moment or two, then left the bed. Crowley muttered insults at himself for a minute and then threw off the covers. 

His angel hadn’t actually gone anywhere. Instead, Aziraphale crawled back over the bed and back over Crowley, kissing him solidly, much to Crowley’s amusement. “Thought you were hungry.”

“I was. But then you looked so handsome, just lying there...”

He tasted like stars, Crowley marveled, and clung to him. 

Breakfast was had, at some point, and tea, and as they felt the city waking around them, they couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer. 

They drew one another close, and chose their faces, pulling and pushing until the angel was the demon, and the demon the angel, down to the smallest details. 

Crowley fiddled with his hands in their new shapes, tugging at his cuffs and twisting the ring on his little finger… His eyes lit upon a circle of gold on the nightstand.

“Angel. You forgot your ring.”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale’s now yellow, slitted eyes looked down. “Oh, thanks awfully. Didn’t even realize I’d taken it off.” He slipped it onto his finger in its accustomed place. It sat over his skin for a second or two and then melted away, hidden under the cover of his demonic mask. “I’ll be off, then.” He smiled at Crowley, who wondered how anyone could possibly mistake Aziraphale for him, even wearing his face. “Good luck, my dear.”

“Mind how you go, angel,” said Crowley, feeling suddenly bereft.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where do an angel and a demon go from here?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sixth and final chapter! And it's still May 1 where I am (for another 20 minutes), so I'm considering this finished on the Good Omens 30th Anniversary!
> 
> Thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

After they'd scared Heaven and Hell into new and hopefully better incarnations, and after lingering in sybaritic fashion over their after-dinner drinks, they went to St. James’ Park. 

It was Aziraphale’s idea. “You sure about this?” asked Crowley, as they walked. “We were just coshed here this morning.” 

“Well, yes, but it seems a shame to give up a favourite rendezvous just because of one little kidnapping. We’ve been visiting this park since it was founded, after all.”

“Mm. It was a very different place, in those days.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed. “Oh, yes…”

They lapsed into thoughts of the past, and between the two of them, their shared memories were warm, dark, and close.

“Well, the bottom’s not so bad. I started from the bottom.”

“I started at the top, and have been working my way down ever since.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

Crowley looked at him, a tiny fond smile hiding in the corner of his mouth. “Am I? Look at me now.” He looked out over the green swathes, the couples walking slowly, the evening joggers out for a last run before bed. “I remember when this park was one of the foulest places in London.”

“Morally foul, certainly.” And Aziraphale gave a prim little shudder.

“It wasn’t considered ‘safe.’ _You_ know.” 

“Yes, but I never thought it was anything to be afraid of. But then, there are so many things that humans have to be afraid of.”

“They’re right to be afraid.”

“Perhaps. But compared with us? Compared with the things we have to be afraid of?”

“It only really differs by degrees, I think.” Their hands brushed together as they walked, bare fingers against only mostly bare ones. A ring of winged gold glinted between them. “Whatever you’re afraid of, you’re safe with me. I know I’m safe with you.”

“Don’t say that, Crowley. Don’t… please don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“It’s not a promise, angel. Just a fact.”

Their eyes met briefly – blue and astonished, yellow and ardent – and then the moment passed and they looked away. But their hands stayed close as they wandered the park aimlessly, sometimes talking and sometimes savouring the silence together, until well after nightfall. 

“You see?” Crowley assured him when they at last meandered their way back to the bookshop, its doorbell tinkling encouragingly. “All back to normal.”

Aziraphale’s delight was palpable. “Oh, it’s all quite perfect,” he sighed happily. 

“Well, apart from those,” Crowley added, gesturing to the pristine ‘Just William’ first editions on their display shelf. “Those are new.”

“Are they?” The angel frowned at the collection for a moment, and then waved a plump hand. “Do you know, Crowley, I think you know my collection better than I do.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Crowley pulled off his sunglasses and ruffled his hair with studied nonchalance. “So, what’re we drinking tonight, hm? Châteauneuf-du-Pape?” 

“Well, we could, if you fancied it, but I recently got my hands on some lovely bottles of Château d'Yquem. 1811.”

“What, comet vintage?”

“Precisely so,” Aziraphale said, smiling at Crowley’s obvious excitement.

They dove into the wine with abandon, eager for those delightful hours in the back of the bookshop, drinking and talking as though it was any other night.

But it wasn't any other night and they both knew it.

“Crowley.”

“Hmm?”

“I... Crowley, I—”

“Just spit it out, angel,” Crowley grumbled. “Whatever’s on your mind—”

“About... last night.”

“...Oh. That. Uh...”

“Could you really have kept us there? In that moment, forever?”

“Probably not.” Crowley’s eyes were bright and warm. “Would’ve made a damned good try of it, though.”

“I’ve no doubt of that, my dear. So... now what?”

“I, wha... Oh. Well.” He avoided Aziraphale’s concerned but worryingly calm gaze. “We spent so much time today not talking about last night, really studiously avoiding talking about last night, that I was starting to hope this was the new status quo.”

“Would you prefer we not talk about this?”

His voice was so forlorn and so _gentle_ that it made Crowley angry how much his heart hurt to hear it. “Honestly, angel, I was hoping this state of affairs would continue until the eventual heat-death of the universe, but…” He grimaced. “Best to rip that bandage off quick, I suppose. Good thing I’m—” Crowley squinted at the level in his glass. “Half a mo’.” He tipped a generous amount of wine in to join the liquid already in his glass and then downed the whole lot. “Right, now I am precisely drunk enough for this conversation.” He signed and rubbed the back of his neck. “So. Last night.”

“Yes.”

“I guess, uh... What do we do?”

Aziraphale toyed with his empty glass. “For my part,” he said slowly, “I don’t see that we need to ‘do’ anything, if you mean in a penitential sense. Everything we said – that I said, at any rate – everything that passed between us... I meant it. I wanted it. Every word, every touch, every look, every—”

Crowley leaned forward sharply and pulled Aziraphale’s mouth against his lips.

“—kiss,” the angel whispered when they parted.

“I meant it all, too,” Crowley murmured. “Good and bad. I’ve never once lied to you. Never will, so help me... er. On my word.”

“That works for me.” Aziraphale curled his fingers around Crowley’s wrist. “Stay with me tonight. I’ve a room upstairs, and… stay. Please.”

Crowley stilled, and gazed at him dumbly. He knew Aziraphale’s bedroom upstairs, for all it wasn’t used very often; in fact, he wasn’t even sure why Aziraphale _had_ a bedroom, when he didn’t sleep and never had guests apart from a certain demon who occasionally indulged too much to be able to sober up properly, and needed to sleep off his wine as the Almighty intended. It was a warm room, and dark, and the bed was soft. 

But not as soft as an angel's feathers, Crowley now knew for certain. Or an angel's hair, or an angel's arms curling around his bony torso and pulling him close in spite of everything and finding the places where softness and angles best fit together. “You sure?” he said at last.

“Quite frightfully sure. The way I see it, we can either pretend that today and yesterday, and even the last eleven years, never happened, and go on as we’ve always done... or we can move forward… together.” Aziraphale trembled over that last word, hesitating and stumbling but pushing onward with a fluttering feeling in his chest that felt like wings beating frantically. “I feel like we’ve just discovered something extraordinary together, and I don’t want to lose that. To lose _you_.”

Crowley’s jaw tightened so hard he thought something would snap. His throat closed up and he was conscious of a weird sensation in his middle like a fist, a soft inexorable clutch in his middle. “Lost you once,” he muttered, his angel’s cheek soft as sleep under his palm. “Can’t do it again. I’ll stay, angel. I... I’ll stay.”

He looked up into Aziraphale’s amazed and smiling face, joy blooming bright and warm and pure as the first sunrise in Creation, that Crowley thought he’d forgotten.


End file.
